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Forget Y2K!

Forget Y2K!

This issue carries the first of several stories linked to the
millennium. Among other purposes, they aim to provide relief from
the pervasive and pesky "Y2K" syndrome, that myopic angst about how
the world's computers will feel when they wake up this coming
January 1. Will they think we are back in January 1, 1900? Or will
everybody's paycheck still be OK?

That is no small matter. But the arrival of A.D. 2000 probably
ought to put us in mind of somewhat broader perspectives, including
some long-lens looks into the far past, or leaps of the imagination
back and forth in human history, 1,000 years at a time. What was
going on a thousand years ago? Or, apart from the major event that
gave rise to the terms "B.C." and "A.D." in our dating system, two
thousand years ago?

If the editors of Time had been around to do their Man of
the Year search near the time of the birth of Christ, their choice
would not have fallen on the babe in the manger, but on Caesar
Augustus, all-powerful in an empire that stretched the rule of
Roman law from Britain across Europe and into Asia Minor. Augustus
himself was about to be declared a god. One millennium ago
Time would have picked Leif Eriksson; in the year 1000,
navigating in a Viking longship, he sailed west to the New World
and called it Vinland.

Because time flies, and keeping precise track of it, not merely
in thousand-year units, but in days, months and years, as well as
seconds, minutes and hours, is a human preoccupation, two of our
millennium stories deal directly with time. The first article in
the series, "Calendar,"
adapted from a remarkable new book by David Ewing Duncan, describes
the long search for an accurate calendar and how, over tortuous
centuries, science and religion poked and pinched into existence
the one we still use. (For hundreds of years a major motive that
drove calendar searchers was the pious compulsion to determine
exactly when Easter ought to fall.) The second story concerns
chronometers, and especially how their evolving degree of accuracy
influenced — and continues to influence — trade, exploration and
war.

Clocks and calendars, being human inventions, are relatively
recent. Another recent — and arguably human — invention is the
Devil himself. An upcoming story suggests that if the Devil didn't
exist, it might have been necessary to invent him (or her), and
tries to get a fix on how the Devil is making out today, in an age
widely held to be shameless. Lashed to the dailiness of life, most
people reckon a generation (at four to a century) as a considerable
amount of time. Even the "threescore years and ten" biblically
allotted to one man's lifetime can seem interminable. The three to
four thousand years of history that go back to include the
flowering of ancient Greece are regarded as vast stretches of time,
in part because so much history has been crammed into them. Other
civilizations started earlier, but it is only in the past three
millennia that most of the events and human inventions that we
think of as adding up to Western Civilization appeared. During this
span there arose, in the arts and government, in religion and
philosophy, above all in science, technology and medicine, the
works of humankind that we point to most often as proof that we are
making some kind of progress: the printing press, the steam engine,
barbed wire, the telephone, electricity, the "painless" air drill
that dentists now use, penicillin and the cappuccino machine, not
to mention such mixed blessings as the internal combustion engine,
television, and atomic power.

In that time, the Western world, at least, has also seen
astonishing variations in religion, starting with polytheism, its
most dramatic example being a dysfunctional family of deities on
Mount Olympus. The father had a penchant for pursuing pretty
mortals; his wife was vindictively jealous; the kids feuded back
and forth. How to propitiate them all became a complex and risky
business.

In most ways monotheism was an immense improvement — a radiant
vision of the whole creation unified, alive with moral purpose,
with a single power keeping score in this world and the next.
Whether divinely inspired or not, it is surely one of the great and
enduring inventions of man. Two hundred years ago, however, a more
secular vision began to take hold, not based on the existence of a
divine being but on high hopes for the perfectibility of human
nature. The Marquis de Condorcet, an Enlightenment philosopher, put
it clearly in 1793 when he wrote, "The total mass of the human
species, through alternating periods of calm and agitation, good
and evil, forever marches, albeit at a slow pace, towards a greater
perfection." With continued help from science and a serious
misreading of evolution as progress, that idea has become a secular
religion of the modern world.

The change in attitude is easily summed up by a pair of
diametrically opposed quotations. One, from Psalm 8, asks a
rhetorical question: "What is man, that thou art mindful of him?"
The other comes from the Greek Sophist Protagoras: "Man is the
measure of all things." As the end of the second millennium A.D.
approaches, the two resounding assertions may be worth putting in
perspective, perhaps even on New Year's Eve of 1999, as a reminder
not only of the breathtakingly brief time during which human beings
have inhabited the planet, but of the breathtakingly long history
of life on earth before we ever appeared. There is some measure of
encouragement, perhaps, in considering just what latecomers we
are.

Celebrated biologist H. J. Muller once asked the readers of one
of his essays to imagine the history of all life-forms on earth as
a rope composed of evolving cells and genes stretching several
hundred miles from New England to New York City, and ending at the
center of a desk in the Wall Street office of J. P. Morgan. The
line represents three or four billion years, starting as far away
as Boston with the appearance of the first minute signs of life on
earth, primeval protoplasm. Blind chemical forces go to work. Genes
mysteriously multiply and differentiate. Mutate, or don't. Trial
and error in numbers beyond computing. Beyond imagination, even.
Following along the line, Muller notes, will seem boring at first,
because "there will be no actual 'beasts' as we ordinarily think of
them (four-footed land animals) until we are well within the limits
of New York City."

It is not until the line reaches Harlem that the first mammals
and birds appear, coexisting with huge dinosaurs who do not drop
out entirely until the lifeline crosses 42nd Street. Monkeys first
arrive a bit south of there, somewhere around Macy's, but nothing
more complex than an ape shows up until the line has reached a spot
directly in front of the House of Morgan. Inside the building, 15
feet from the desk, stands the first Neanderthal. Homo sapiens,
"'man the wise,'" as Muller notes with some irony, "leaves his
first remains within the private office, only seven and a half feet
from the desk." The earliest known "civilization" (not more than
14,000 years ago) leaves its crockery only "a yard and a half from
the desk." Muller concludes: "On the desk, one foot from the
center, stands old King Tut. Five and a half inches from the center
we mark the Fall of Rome and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Only
one and a half inches from the present end of the cord [New
England-to-New York lifeline] come the discovery of America and the
promulgation of the Copernican theory — through which man opens his
eyes for the first time to the vastness of the world in which he
lives and his own relative insignificance." Half an inch from the
end "start the first faint reverberations of the Industrial
Revolution.... A quarter of an inch from the end Darwin speaks, and
man awakes to the transitory character of his shape and his
institutions."

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